Taken by the Beast (The Conduit Series Book 1) (28 page)

And yet, I still sensed something was wrong about that. Looking at his hand, still human as it entwined with mine, I could not help but wonder how he was resisting the pull of the moon that should have changed him into a beast by now. If love wasn’t the driving force for his resistance, then what was?

“Hey,” a young man yelled. “There’s some rooms down here!”

My whole body stiffened, bracing for the inevitable—not even sure what the inevitable was. Soon the young man was in the doorway, staring us down. He trembled, though, not so brave when faced with Abram … not until the others were at his back.

Dozens of people clogged the hallway, and some of the bigger men of the town forced their way to the front. My heart dropped as I recognized some of the faces in the crowd. Faces I grew up with.

Mrs. Adler, who had tended my cut that time I scraped my knee following Lulu on our brand new roller blades, was nearly foaming at the mouth with a pick axe in her hand. She had been so gentle then, so kind as she washed and bandaged my leg. Seeing the fear and anger in her eyes now was almost surreal.

And there was Douglas Feathersby—my first kiss. He gave me a nickel under Hopkin’s Bridge and planted a wet one right on my lips. He told me he would always love me. I probably shouldn’t have expected him to keep his word, given that we were seven and all. Of course, I also never would have imaged a reality where he was running toward me with a pitchfork.

But now that they had us cornered, it seemed everything slowed down. Each man and woman assessing the best way to kill the beast—or rather, the man with the beast within him.

“Char,” Douglas said, “get away from him.” He reached his hand out to me, as though I would go running to his protection, as if the mob were here to save me. Maybe they were. “Hurry, before it’s too late!”

I took a step back, shaking my head. If I left Abram’s side, he was as good as dead. If I stayed here, eventually they would go after Abram anyway, and they would kill us both. But this was buying us time.

“I don’t want to kill them,” Abram said to me quietly. He hadn’t so much as flinched this entire time.

“Then don’t,” I said.

And I meant it. These people didn’t know what they were doing. They were pawns, just like me—chess pieces in a game none of us understood. Killing them would be as useless as wearing socks with designer heels.

But as the first man lunged at Abram, swiping a torch in a large arc meant to set him on fire, I didn’t know what to want anymore. If Abram didn’t fight back, they would kill him. If he did, these men and women would die—none of them bad people, just misled and afraid.

Abram pounced, even in his human form so clearly animalistic with his grace and fluidity. But before he landed, the pull of the moon finally had its way with him. His hands twisted into something sharper as he reared back.

I flinched for what would be bloody impact. But instead of shredding the townsfolk, Abram’s claw drug across the light fixture, blanketing the room in darkness.

I felt hands grab at me hard. I struggled against them, sure that Douglas Feathersby was either going to drag me away or demand his nickel back. But then I felt a breath on my neck, and I knew it was Abram.

His now much hairier, beastly arms pushed me westward and the last thing I saw was the glint of shattering glass against my face.

I spun around to throw my arms around Abram’s neck as a rush of cool invaded my nostrils and filled my lungs. He swept me around onto his back as we flew through the air, falling toward the hard concrete of Main Street.

But I wasn’t afraid. Abram was with me and, our current predicament aside, I knew enough to know that my best shot was in his arms—or in this case, on his back.

“I’ve got you,” he called over his shoulder to me as the ground rushed up to greet us. “I’ve always got you.”

His feet hit hard against the ground, but he didn’t falter. I slid down from his back, and he turned to face me, once
again a man. He was really fighting the beast thing, and while he wasn’t entirely successful, I was impressed.

“Are you all right, Charisse?” he murmured, brushing the stray hairs from my face.

“We have to hurry,” I said breathlessly. Of course I wasn’t all right. I was running for my life—running away from people I grew up with. “They’re still coming.”

Looking behind us, I saw that the moon window, the window he had just jumped through, was still intact. But how could that be? I felt it shatter against my skin. I heard the crunch as Abram’s boot landed against shards of it. Now it was there again, the red moon almost completely colored in.

“The window …” I said.

“I know,” Abram answered, already a man again. In one swift motion, he threw me over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t be much of a curse if all it took was a couple of warm bodies to break it.”

As he sprinted forward, a cold gust of wind cascaded over my back. He was moving too fast for me to tell where we were heading. All I knew was that the sounds of the mob, as well as the lights of Main Street, were fading away quickly.

He skidded to a stop. Leaves rustled around us. After he helped me slide off of his back again, I saw we were back in the woods, only feet away from the old house.

It was strange how much time we had spent in these woods together. Along with the Castle, it sort of felt like ‘our place’ … aside from how we almost got ourselves killed every time we came here.

“What is it?” I asked, spying the way he grabbed his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he answered. “I just need a moment.”

I brushed his hand away, revealing his shoulder as a mess of red gashes, and I gasped. “My God! Look at all that blood!”

“One of them nicked me with something. I’ll be fine. Self-healing, remember?” His face shifted, nearly changing back into that of the beast. His mouth closed hard, and he reverted to his old (and quite stunning) features. “We need to move.”

“To where?”

“Inside,” he said, nodding toward the house, the hand of his good arm clutching his wound once more. “I’ve set up some fail safes, just in case something like this happened.

“But you won’t be you,” I answered, grazing his arm with my fingers. “How much longer can you keep the beast at bay?”

“Not as long as I need to.” He grimaced. “I think I’m out of time.”

And the way he said that, the finality of it, sparked something inside of me. I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean by that?”

He brushed past me to head toward the house, growling under his breath. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

“Hell no!” I said, grabbing his arm and spinning him back toward me. “I’m about ten miles past ready to hear that, Abram.” My hand tightened around his arm. “You’re gonna be straight with me. You’re gonna stop treating me with kid gloves. Or this is where you and me part ways. Got it?”

He glared at me. “That would be a death sentence for you, Char.”

I tilted my chin up. “Like you care.”

The expression in his face was so pained it felt like razors in my own heart. “I do,” he said, his voice shifting lower. “Damn it, Charisse. You’re making this harder than it already is.”

“It’s the damn moon,” he said finally. “And what I did to it.”

“
What
did you do to it, Abram?” I asked.

“Magic is about balance and energy. When Satina was on the other side, keeping the curse fed wasn’t an issue. There’s unlimited energy in the afterlife. But when I brought her back, all that changed. The curse began to sputter out. With Satina cut off from the energy that powered it, the curse began a sort of countdown. And, because that’s what she tied it to, the next full moon became the anchor for it.”

“Speak English,” I said with a growl of my own. “And do it quickly. I doubt Dalton and his mob are going to take long to figure out we came back here.”

“The reason the moon on the window phased into waxing is because I brought Satina back. With every moon, we took one step closer to stripping all the magic from the curse.”

“That’s a good thing,” I said. “It’s almost colored in now. Your curse will end. So what’s the issue?”

“Yes, the moon is almost colored in now,” Abram conceded, but he didn’t have the same joy I had. “This is the last night. This is the last moon of the curse that’s plagued me for over a hundred years.”

“That’s great,” I answered. What was his problem? Was this like Stockholm syndrome? “You can be a man again. You can have another chance. Isn’t that what you want?”

“More than anything,” he answered. “Well, more than
almost
anything. But I don’t think you understand, Char. I never broke the curse. The curse isn’t breaking … its ending.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, my eyebrows pulling together. “What’s the difference? What does that
mean
?”

He looked past me, to the sky above, to the moon with only but a sliver away from complete. “When the moon is full, Charisse, I will remain a beast. Forever.”

Abram’s words literally clanged against my ears, screeching like nails against a chalkboard. Instantly, they exhausted me. It seemed it would never end, the constant twists and turns of fate. Every revelation seemed to dig us deeper into this hopeless pit. And this was no different.

We were hours away from sunrise, hours away from his curse becoming a permanent, unbreakable thing. And I could do nothing to save him.

He had to love and be loved in return. How does one accomplish that in the span of a single night?

Hurt engraved itself into my heart. The truth was, I did love Abram. I loved him more than I had every loved anyone in that way. And he … just didn’t feel the same way.

It was then that a sickening truth leveled itself onto me. Is that why Abram had gotten so close to me? Had he wormed his way into my heart hoping that I might be the person he could fall in love with? Had he used me in some halfhearted attempt to break an age-old curse? And, worse than that, had he found me lacking?

Still, it wasn’t as though I could fault him for his feelings, or for trying to love me, or for wanting to break his curse.

Fact was, I would fight for him until the end. And, even though he didn’t love me, I knew he would fight for me, too. He had proven that much. He had risked his life for me time and time again. Even now, in our darkest hour, he didn’t flinch once as he faced the incredible odds to keep me safe. But why?

“Are you sure about this, Abram? If you don’t break the curse tonight, it can really never be broken?”

He gave a solemn nod. “I would still have the days, same as now. But that would be it for me. The hopes of reclaiming nights as a man will be gone forever. All chance for redemption will be lost.” He looked down at his clawed hands and let out a sound between a growl and a sigh. “But that doesn’t matter now.”

“Of course it matters,” I said, determined not to let his lack of feelings for me alter my feelings for him. I took his hands in my own, claws be damned. “There has to be something we can do. Anything. Just tell me what.”

“You shouldn’t concern yourself with this, Charisse. There’s too much going on, too much at stake. The curse is the least of my concerns.”

“Well, it shouldn’t be,” I said. “And you shouldn’t have started whatever mystical clock you did by bringing Satina back.”

“I don’t want to fight with you right now,” he answered quietly, recognizing the tone in my voice.

“Too bad.” I ran hands through my hair, shaking out my natural curls and trying to reset my tired brain. “I’d rather not be running from a Frankenstien’s monster-esque mob, but we are where we are.” My voice was lower now, more sincere. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“I understand that. And I also understand that you didn’t do anything to deserve it. You were born into this life.” He was barely able to keep his human form now, struggling as he was against his beastly nature. “But I will keep you safe,” he said. “I swear it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” I said, my voice breaking. “I know you’ll do everything you can to keep me safe. But I didn’t ask you to. And I certainly didn’t ask you to give away your one chance at happiness to get it done.”

“Charisse—”

“No.” I threw my hands in front of me, no longer willing to let the elephant in the room remain unseen. “I get that you don’t love me and, if you give me a little time to process that, I might even be able to understand it. But what I don’t understand—what I’m not sure I’ll ever understand—is why you would do something like this for someone you didn’t even care about.”

His eyes shot open. The entirety of his morphing body tensed. “Why would you say something like that?” He moved closer to me. “Why the hell would you even think something like that?”

I bristled as he neared me. It was strange. Hours ago, his body felt like home to me—that safe place I had spent my entire life looking for but had never found. And now, with this newest revelation, I couldn’t think of anything more ludicrous.

“You know why,” I said. “You don’t love me.” Anger started to pool in my gut and bubble up like venom through my throat and out my mouth. “I scoffed at Satina when she compared me to all your other conquests. I actually thought there was something different about me, about us. But I was wrong. I didn’t think someone could touch someone the way you touched me and not feel anything behind it.”

His mouth, almost completely a snout now, clenched together. With pain etched in his face, he transformed his face back into human form. “I know you think you know everything. God knows you’re stubborn enough to think you can see every piece on this chess board. But there are some things, Charisse, that are even above that beautiful, hard head of yours.”

“You either love me or you don’t, Abram. Love isn’t a complicated thing. It’s there or it’s not.”

A loud shuffling sounded from far off.

“They’re coming,” Abram said, crouching into a feral position. “We need to get into the house.”

“Why?” I asked.

“There’s no time for that. Get on.” He leaned over, motioning for me to climb on his back.

I didn’t move.

“Damn it Charisse! Get on my goddamn back!”